Are You With Me Hobbes?

New York City, NY – Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Calvin & Hobbes have been a huge inspiration to me (as you can guess by my little collection) and at one point they almost inspired my career to spin into a different direction. Back in 2004 I started roughing out ideas for a sequential 3-4 panel comic strip I was thinking of launching on ArtSucks.com. Luckily, the idea of having to regularly ink and color paneled strips bored the shit out of me so I sidelined the project.

The film, which seems to be a love letter in doc form from the comic strip community to Calvin & Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson seems to have enlisted some of the top talent in the industry to profess their admiration for that scruffy little imaginative kid and his sarcastic tiger.

The film was another successful FUND on Kickstarter with a goal of $50,000 they managed to raise nearly double that by the time their Kickstarter ended.

It’s been 10 years since Watterson retired the strip that launched a thousand careers, and millions of minds to wander, and although hardbound anthologies and collections keep coming out, no new strips are being produced, the run is done, as it were.

Watterson could have easily made a fortune selling Calvin & Hobbes merch ala The Simpsons, Star Wars, South Park, or any other chincy franchise, yet he has never let the corporate machine steam roll over him, and other than a few unlicensed t-shirts, window decals, and truck mudflaps of an evil looking Calvin pissing on the ground, the characters have remained pristine.

I look forward to seeing this documentary, and because I missed the boat on the Kickstarter, I’ll just have to wait till it comes to the local art house theatre or film festival. Until then, remember :

“Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure.” -Calvin